Guelph’s poverty problem amounts to ‘a lot of people’

Perspective on poverty

Jack Schweitzer, manager of Freshstart Resource Centre, says various government policies are creating more poor people and a local anti-poverty task force isn't making a dent in the poverty problem.

Food Bank staff busy

Mercury file photo

Tracy Marchesich (left) of the Guelph Food Bank and volunteer Marilee Gagnon organize non-perishables in this March file photo. A new report on the local poverty situation asserts that more than 6,000 locals accessed food banks in 2011.

GUELPH — When alleviating poverty is a challenge, the thought of eliminating it is a faint hope.

People in Guelph close to the issue know this conflict all too well.

Jack Schweitzer sees dire straits in his position as manager of Freshstart Resource Centre on Baker Street, circumstances that could drive a person to cynicism, if not despair. He’s been at Freshstart for more than 15 years. It’s a place people turn to for help, most needing affordable housing that is nearly impossible to find.

People who have lived in poverty for a long time, for whom it is a way of life, know more or less how to get by on little, Schweitzer says. They know where to go for free groceries, a hot meal, or other services that stretch a buck or services that fulfil a need when there is no buck to stretch. They’re used to it. It’s not quite as catastrophic for them.

But newly poor don’t know what hit them, he says. They find themselves trying to navigate confounding systems with next to no money to their name, staggered and stunned by a desperate, free-falling situation, often in an emotional spiral that makes it hard to think straight.

A recent report from the Guelph and Wellington Task Force for Poverty Elimination indicates nearly 6,000 people in the area were assisted by food banks in 2011, with more than 1,250 households on the waiting list for affordable housing. Insiders say the numbers are not going down. The problem is no where near being eliminated.

The average monthly caseload for Ontario Works was 1,874 in 2011, with 11.5 per cent of private households living below the low-income measure, the report reads. Households that make an income less than half of the national average are considered low income, according to the Statistics Canada definition.

The local task force for poverty elimination has been around since 2009. In that time, it has advocated for a public transit subsidy for the poor, produced materials on food access, community gardens and collective kitchens. It has generated discussion and launched a research project.

Some say the word “elimination” in the all-inclusive task force’s name — there are more than 30 member organizations — is overly lofty. Task force co-ordinator Randalin Ellery and several others concede it is a long-term process, and often all that can be done right now is to make existing services, such as emergency food distribution, a bit easier to access.

In the meantime, the poor are getting poorer. Jobs are scarce. Welfare payments don’t cover basic needs. Minimum-wage jobs are no match for the rising cost of living.

Many are quick to mention the monetary figure $595. That’s the amount a single person on Ontario Works receives each month to cover all costs. For many, the figure is symbolic of government neglect of the poor, and even of the punitive nature of government policy toward poor people.

Ellery said it is “next to impossible” to live on $595 a month and that is why people must use food banks. The task force, she said, was pleased to see the final recommendations of the provincial Commission for the Review of Social Services — 108 recommendations that call for “transformational change” to the social assistance system. The full report can be found at www.socialassistancereview.ca/final-report.

The local task force now has a role to play in advocating for the implementation of the commission’s recommendations, but, Ellery said, with the Ontario legislature prorogued, there won’t be any changes made just yet.

Among the commission’s recommendations are the replacement of Ontario Works and the Ontario Disability Support Program with a new integrated program that provides all recipients with “individualized employment services” that better help people move into employment. Indeed, removing barriers to employment is a central focus of the commission’s recommendations.

“People in poverty are not just those on social assistance,” Tina Brophey says.

The 46-year-old has Crohn’s disease and lives on disability support. She also works part-time as a community development assistant at Onward Willow Centre, helping people living in poverty navigate the system, advocating on their behalf.

“There’s the working poor, as well. If you’re working 40 hours a week at a minimum-wage job, you’re still living below the poverty line. So it is a lot of people.”

When you are in poverty, there is a poverty of choices, Brophey said. “You are making the choice between rent and food. So, you pay the rent and then if you are single on welfare you have about $100 left for groceries for a month. That’s poverty — where you are actually lacking the basics. I would rather have more than the bare-bones basics required. But you can’t even have the basics — food, shelter, transportation.”

Once someone is “down and out, and in the system,” it’s very hard to get out of it, Brophey said. The poor become like “a hunter-gatherer,” she said, going from place to place finding bread one day, a hot meal the next. It is a day-to-day struggle for survival.

“You just can’t afford anything,” she said. “You can’t afford to go out and look for a job, because you really can’t afford the clothes to look good. You can’t afford the dental so that when you smile you don’t have a whole bunch of broken teeth. You can’t afford the upgrading or skills training. There are programs out there, but they’re not necessarily geared to fit the jobs that are available.”

What a poor person needs, she said, is enough money to live in dignity, where they don’t need to get food from food banks or medications from emergency programs.

“Where you don’t have to go asking for help every month,” she said. “Definitely what we need is a livable wage or livable rate.”

There have been more recently impoverished and formerly middle-class people coming to Freshstart Resource Centre in recent times due to economic circumstances, particularly layoffs in the manufacturing sector, Schweitzer said.

And while there is some help, there are systemic deficiencies that exacerbate rather than ease their challenges.

“Most everyone who comes in here is living in poverty,” Schweitzer said. “And there are new people, recently on (Employment Insurance) because they lost their job in recent years. Then they go on Ontario Works, and often their family splits up and they can’t cope with it, particularly the middle class that didn’t think they would ever be in this situation. People are just shocked.”

In the last three or so years, there is more of this latter group showing up, looking for housing, looking for help. And here’s the most despairing part, from Schweitzer’s perspective: These people are not being helped by those who should be helping them — their governments.

“So many people just can’t cope with their situation. They’re depressed. They’ve never sought help in their life. They cared for themselves and they never needed counselling. They don’t know how to ask for counselling and they don’t know what’s out there. And they are completely shocked that a single person gets $600 on Ontario Works. There isn’t much hope.”

Usually, he said, these recently impoverished people have lots of household items that once stocked their middle-class homes, but now have nowhere to put them. And they are shocked to find that an average bachelor apartment in the city costs $700 a month.

For the past three or so years, the poverty task force, made up of 30 representatives from just about every group with any connection to the poor in Guelph and Wellington County, has been working to eliminate poverty in the area.

But people such as Schweitzer, and others with an insider’s perspective on the work of the task force, say the goal of poverty elimination can never be realized until the systemic issues — municipal, provincial and even national in scope — are addressed.

You can make it easier for people to find the food bank, the community garden, or free recreational services, but you can do nothing to get them out of poverty if you don’t give them the financial resources to make a better life for themselves — to eat healthier food and improve their health, to spruce up their wardrobe to look better at a job interview, to take the depressing edge off when it comes to choosing between rent and groceries.

“A poverty committee is not going to solve poverty,” Schweitzer said. “It is legislated to have people living in poverty. Every government — federal, provincial and municipal — has legislation that keeps people in poverty, either too low of a minimum wage, low welfare rates, or union busting.”

People with mental illness, who are on disability support, are also kept in poverty because they only receive about $1,000 per month to live on. And why does this situation persist?

“Basically, poor people don’t have much of a voice,” Schweitzer said. “I suspect they don’t vote, by and large. They have no reason to vote. They are just getting through, one day at a time.”

In October, Ottawa-based Citizens for Public Justice made a submission to the United Nations Human Rights Council’s Universal Periodic Review for Canada. In that submission, Citizens for Public Justice highlighted that fact that previously, the periodic review had made a recommendation that Canada implement a national eradication of poverty strategy that incorporates a human rights framework. The federal government rejected the recommendation, calling the issue a provincial and territorial responsibility.

Poverty levels in Canada, the group’s submission states, have hovered around 10 per cent of the Canadian population for several decades, yet government programs and transfers “currently do not ensure that all Canadians have enough income for well-being — despite Canada’s position among the world’s seven wealthiest countries.”

Brophey sits on the poverty task force. She said it is simply not realistic to think in terms of eliminating poverty, but alleviation is possible.

“Just to make it easier for a person living in poverty to get to the food bank is just taking care of a symptom,” she said. “The root cause is still there. I don’t actually want to have to access the food bank.”

“Dental care is a big thing among the poor,” she continued. “I know so many people in their 30s with no teeth, because there’s no preventative care, there’s no tooth repair, there’s just extractions.”

Schweitzer called the Guelph and Wellington Task Force for Poverty Elimination a waste of time and money.

“They are still collecting statistics,” he said. “Meanwhile, churches are set up to give people food. Some of the food is good, some of it’s not very good. But all they are doing is helping governments impoverish people, by taking on that role that should be provided by one or other level of government. They are letting the government off the hook.”

Everyone in Canada is a victim of the system, he said. More poverty results in more crime, more suicides, more broken families, more substance abuse.

The task force’s recent report, released in September, indicates there has been a 54 per cent increase in the monthly Ontario Works caseload for Guelph and Wellington between 2008 and 2011. Families wait from two to nine years for subsidized housing.

“It doesn’t pay to have a large percentage of people in poverty,” Schweitzer said.

“It’s horrible on a person’s health,” Brophey said of living in poverty.

It is nearly impossible to eat a healthy diet, especially with food prices. The food available at emergency food cupboards, she said, is generally unhealthy, highly processed items, with little fresh food being offered. Poor diet affects one’s mood, energy levels and disposition, she added.

“Some of the agencies that are there to help us really don’t know what it’s like, and you feel kind of degraded sometimes,” Brophey said. “I know people who are turned down at the food banks who are on social assistance. We have clients all the time who say they can’t go there.”

Lorna Schwartzentruber, executive director of Onward Willow Better Beginnings Better Futures, also sits on the task force. She said good work has been done on the task force over the past couple of years. But the group, she acknowledged, has taken on an enormous task.

“I think the group has really come together to start having those conversations in a really concise way and as a big community, as opposed to just individual organizations, or individual pockets,” Schwartzentruber said. “I think a lot has happened in terms of a sense of collective responsibility to really address some of these issues. That is a change I’ve seen in Guelph since this task force started.”

She said she doesn’t have “high, high hopes,” but people are talking, and are committed to making a difference. The most exciting aspect of the task force for her, she said, is the community voices subgroup within it — the group that gives those actually living in poverty an opportunity to have their voices heard, and to gain skills and momentum in advocacy.

Systems such as Ontario Works, its rules and regulations, are not going to be changed overnight, Schwartzentruber said. But involving local administrators in ongoing dialogue gives them a better sense of the community and encourages them to take an advocacy role.

But the reality is more people are living in poverty.

“I think families are certainly struggling, and finding it harder and harder to get out of that poverty cycle,” Schwartzentruber said, adding the economy continues to hit families hard. Employment opportunities are meagre, and those who have lost good jobs, primarily in the manufacturing sector, are often only able to find temporary jobs.

“I don’t think we can give up,” she said. “We just have to keep the work going — keep people talking to each other, otherwise people on the ground get discouraged very quickly. You have to keep working toward something greater.”